1.
Thanks.
In
this
talk,
I’m
going
to
look
at
issues
of
context
and
community
through
the
lens
of
a
long-­‐term
interest
of
mine
–
design
for
ci<es,
and
in
par<cular,
urban
green
space.
What
do
I
mean
by
urban
green
space?
Just
what
you
think.
Any
place
with
plants
in
a
city
–
from
window
boxes
to
giant
parks.
I’m
not
a
planner,
nor
an
architect.
I’m
an
interac<on
designer.
But
I’m
interested
in
the
design
of
interven<ons
in
built
spaces,
and
I
think
you
all
should
be
too.
As
industrial
design
spills
out
into
interac<on
design
spills
out
into
appliance
design
spills
out
into
service
design,
ques<ons
of
how
and
where
we
deal
with
not
just
building
scale
but
urban
scale
maHers
becomes
a
ques<on
we
can
ask
ask
and
answer.
I
have
two
goals
for
this
talk.
The
first
is
to
show
you
how
fascina<ng
and
interes<ng
this
space
is
-­‐-­‐-­‐
and
then
second,
to
discuss
why
its
hard.
But
don’t
worry
–
I’ll
be
going
over
some
tac<cs
that
I’ve
found
par<cularly
useful.
And
finally,
I’ll
be
turning
back
to
the
ideas
of
context
and
community,
which
animate
this
session.
This
is
going
to
be
a
whirlwind
tour
of
a
big
area.
Let’s
hope
I
raise
a
lot
of
ques<ons
and
issues
that
we
can
discuss
in
the
panel.
1

2.
At
the
moment,
I’m
a
PhD
candidate
at
UC
Berkeley.
My
background
is
in
design
research
–
research
for
product
development,
prototyping
and
design
as
a
way
to
do
R&D
for
large
companies,
and
research
on
design
prac<ce.
This
talk
combines
two
long-­‐term
interests
of
mine.
The
first
is
what’s
been
called
urban
compu<ng
or
urban
informa<cs,
which
I’ve
been
thinking
about
since
about
2002.
You
can
think
about
it
as
applica<ons
for
city
life,
such
as
the
map-­‐
based
chat
you
see
in
the
middle
and
a
picture
above
that
of
map-­‐based
urban
theater
game
I
designed.
The
second
is
what’s
oVen
called
user-­‐centered
or
human-­‐centered
design.
I’ve
taught
design
research
at
Berkeley,
and
I’m
in
the
middle
of
revising
Observing
the
User
Experience,
a
handbook
of
user
research
techniques.
At
any
rate,
aVer
focusing
for
a
while
on
what
you
might
call
sidewalk
and
streetlevel
interac<ons,
I
got
into
studying
urban
green
space
largely
because
it
seemed
like
such
unexplored
territory
for
digital
design.
“GREEN
SPACE?!”
People
would
say
to
me.
“How
is
THAT
digital?”
I’m
just
contrary
enough
to
take
that
as
a
challenge
to
see
what
there
was.
And
also,
of
course,
I
felt
that
green
space
–
parks,
and
especially
community
gardens
–
was
something
I
wanted
to
support.
Green
spaces
are
places
of
beauty
and
play.
They
mi<gate
pollu<on
and
storm
damage.
Sidewalks
and
streets
can
be
difficult,
messy
places,
full
of
arguments
about
traffic,
rights-­‐of-­‐way,
and
other
issues
that
come
up
when
people
bump
and
crowd
each
other.
Green
space,
I
thought.
What
a
completely
benign
and
harmonious
topic.
I
had
a
lot
to
learn.
2

3.
Since we’re in New Orleans, I wanted to kick off this talk with a story of community and context from right here. This
story exemplifies some of the thorny issues involved in designing for urban green space, and with neighborhoods..
Can every one who’s seen the map to the right raise a hand? Good.
Here’s the short story. In 2006, a taskforce called “Bring New Orleans Back” released this map to accompany a plan
created with the Urban Land Institute for New Orleans neighborhoods. What it showed is some areas where rebuilding
would continue, some areas where rebuilding would be put on hold, and SOME areas, marked with green dots, which
there was a real possibility would be turned into parkland. There was a real chance, residents believed, that they
would be bought out, whether they wanted to move or not.
The release of this map immediately triggered an uproar, especially in neighborhoods like Broadmoor – inhabitants
shown at a Times Picayune photo at left – under the shadow of the green dots. Faced with what they feared would be
the destruction of their homes and their neighborhood, they revolted against the plan. Just think about that quote –
“Mama, they plan on putting a greenway on your house.”
What I find interesting about this map is the contrast between the specificity of the red-outlined areas, and the
“approximate” vagueness of the green dots. It’s as if the real focus of attention were those red outlines, and the green
dots were just…background. “Context,” let’s say, for the new development.
There are two immediately obvious kinds of design taking place. One, urban planning for post-Katrina New Orleans,
and two, the communication design of the poster. I would argue that there was a third process, perhaps
unacknowledged but key to the success of the first two, which was the design of the collaboration between “the
commission” and “the community.”
The green dots backlash, I would argue, is the revenge of “context.” And community. What you think of as background
may well be the central battleground of someone’s life.
REFERENCES
Kennedy School of Government case study: http://www.ksgcase.harvard.edu/caseTitle.asp?caseNo=1893.0
Times Picayune article http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2010/08
many_areas_marked_for_green_space_after_hurricane_katrina_have_rebounded.html
3

4.
We’ll return to urban planning and the green dots later. For the moment, though, I
want to highlight some interesting stuff happening in product and service design for
urban green space right now.
My motive here in discussing these at all is two-fold.
First, I want to highlight some inspirations for, possibly, your own work.
Second, I want to give you a sense of the richness of this space, and the number of
different disciplines that can potentially get involved – industrial and interaction
designers, landscape designers and architects – and of course, not to mention policy-
makers and community groups.
I’ve divided these projects into four themes. I’ll discuss them in order of complexity.
From projects that intervene in small or brief ways in the built environment, to projects
that seek to reshape entire cities and regions.
I’ll be honest – I would love to spend the entire talk highlighting inspirational and
exciting projects. But I really don’t have the time/ Instead, I’m going to breeze past a
limited number of exemplar projects, and ask you guys to come up and talk to me or
email me about them later if you want more information.
4

5.
The art group Rebar, for example, sponsors International Park(ing) Day each year, in which
people around the world turn parking spots into temporary mini-parks.
The industrial design group Common Studio turns a vintage candy vending machines into
dispensers for seedbombs – globs of local seeds, clay, and fertilizer that, when thrown into an
abandoned lot, turn it into a carpet of wildflowers.
Parisian artist Paule Kingleur mods anti-parking posts on sidewalks into tiny planters by
attaching small bags of soil.
These three projects are all close to traditional industrial design. What they all have in
common is a playful approach to urban infrastructures, and in particular abandoned or
underused spaces. They rely largely on individual initiative, and suggest ways in which
passersby could also intervene. I label these projects “planting ideas” because their effects lie
not in the scale of their effects, but in the way they provoke the imagination.
5

6.
This second category of projects tries to help individuals reap the personal benefits of
gardening by helping them learn to do it better.
Botanicalls is a cheap sensor kit that actually calls you or tweets when your plant needs water.
MyFolia is a gardening website which connects gardeners who grow similar plants or live
under similar conditions. In a sense, it’s accumulating expert, microlocal knowledge about
what to do, when.
What is most interesting is the way in which projects like this suggest how we could start
distributing the responsibility for caring for plants
- Not just keep the things alive
- But developing trust relationships with other people through the shared attachment
to a living thing
----
Botanicalls photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbeltjones/3155923557/
6

7.
The
third
category
takes
up
that
idea
of
stewardship
to
move
from
Do
It
Yourself
to
Do
it
Ourselves,
rethinking
no<ons
of
ownership.
We tend to draw strong lines between public and private space, between what we can and
cannot physically access, or can and cannot care for. A few recent projects use the Internet to rethink who
provides
food
to
whom,
and
what
kinds
of
rela<onships
we
have
to
property.
These
projects
broker
rela<onships
between
people
and
places.
They
network
the
produc<on
and
consump<on
of
food
–
and
of
less
tangible
goods.
In
guerilla
gardening,
in
which
an
ad-­‐hoc
groups
of
gardeners
self-­‐organize
to
replant
an
abandoned
areas
neglected
by
the
city.
Or
the
Find
Fruit
iPhone
app,
which
allows
people
to
find
publicly
accessible
fruit
trees
in
people’s
front
yards,
ready
to
harvest.
Finally,
we
have
a
new
business
model
–
that
of
the
distributed
backyard
farm,
in
which
backyards
across
a
city
are
turned
into
one
giant
community
supported
agriculture
project.
What’s
interes<ng
to
me
is
that
many
of
these
projects
are
not
objects,
per
se,
but
compelling
ideas
that
are
some<mes
ar<culated
as
books
and
online
forums,
as
in
the
guerilla
gardening
movement
or
urban
scavenging,
some<mes
as
a
business
model,
as
in
distributed
farming.
7

8.
But what about larger, longer processes and ecosystems?
Collecting and visualizing information about very local events and conditions can be used to
tell stories about bigger trends. Then, how those stories are told and distributed can help form
new coalitions. Coalitions that can work towards political action and commitment. ParkScan is
a citizen reporting system for park maintenance violations in San Francisco. It makes it easy to
get individual problems fixed – but also allows the non-profit which runs it to track government
responsiveness to citizen complaints. Photographs and other visualizations of these patterns
are important to collective action. They become charismatic images – images that can prompt
belief, and action. Like the green dots.
Landshare is a website that brokers agreements online to share cultivation of unused urban
and suburban land, so that I could find someone who wants to garden in, literally, my own
backyard. What’s interesting is that the website has also started to encourage and support
political organizing campaigns in the UK to make the practice easier. But I think it’s amazing,
in terms of doing urban food politics through the clever use of existing web technology.
8

9.
So we’ve gone through some great examples of what designing for urban green space can
look like.
What I want to do now is take a step back and propose some concepts – some tools for
thinking with – that you could use in your own work. Some concepts that have helped me get
some purchase on the complexity of getting involved, often as a relative outsider, in spaces
and places that people care for.
9

10.
We often think of green space as a kind of “nature” in cities that is somehow opposed to
technological innovation.
The
first
thing
I
want
to
point
out,
which
may
be
obvious
to
you,
but
which
was
not
to
me
when
I
started,
is
that
green
spaces
are
a
technology
of
urban
living.
This picture is a representation of the Air Trees installation in an arid, hot housing
development near Madrid. While waiting for “real trees” to grow in, architects planned a
temporary gathering place for inhabitants that would serve some of the same purposes that
parks or plazas might. The circular structure is filled with rings of potted plants. The plants
condition the air inside and provide shade. The circular arrangement works like a chimney,
drawing hot air up and leaving the shaded area many degrees cooler – like natural air
conditioning.
I’m not recommending that everyone install something like this. What I’m suggesting is that we
can see greenery as a kind of technology of cities. And I think this example highlights how we
can see greenery as technology in different ways – as a tool to accomplish certain ends, as a
deliberately engineered artifact, as a techne – a skill, of life.
The
ques<on
is,
like
all
designed
tools,
for
what
end?
For
the
personal
growth
of
individuals?
For
food
security
and
jobs?
For
neighborhood
survival?
10

11.
Green spaces – not just gardens – connect together many disparate urban elements. They
bring individuals together. They are part of urban ecosystems, working to process pollution
and drain water. They are part of neighborhood revitalization, as in Quesada Garden, a one-
block community garden in San Francisco that serves as a local hub for political organization
and anti-crime efforts.
So here’s a diagram, drawn from my research on community gardens, that suggests how
many actors might be involved in something as seemingly simple as a single community
garden. The closer a circle is to the big green “garden” circle, the more present it is in the
physical space of the garden.
It’s striking how many different kinds of actors are involved in keeping community gardens
alive – people, technologies like email lists and GIS, laws about how you can use land,
political parties who get involved in supporting or limiting gardens, chemicals.
That’s why I think it’s helpful to think of green spaces not on their own but as networks – of
ecosystems, of social relationships, of urban political arrangements. We can start to ask
ourselves – who and what can green spaces connect? And what connects green spaces? It
allows us to see non-humans like bees and water drops as part of the design space – and
think about not just human-centered design but design for non-humans as well.
11

12.
The
next
thing
I
want
to
discuss
is
everything
that
stands
in
the
way
of
remaking
urban
spaces
through
design
–
their
obduracy.
Obduracy is a very useful concept coined by urbanist Anique Hommels to describe why Things. Don’t.
Change. Many people have brought up similar ideas, but I think the concept of obduracy is a helpful
framework for putting your dilemma into perspective. It has three different dimensions.
1) Frames – local political interests and struggles for dominance.
2) Embeddedness – the degree to which an object depends on other ones, and is in turn a source of
dependency.
3) Enduring attitudes and habits – what we might call ‘cultures.’
Obduracy is an excellent way to describe what happened to the promoters of the “green dots” plan.
The framing of this particular issue was very damaging – it seemed like outsiders coming in, with the
help of powerful local politicians, and telling people what to do with what they saw as their own
homes.
But even despite the ravages of Katrina, these homes and neighborhoods were embedded – people
owned their homes and had legal protection. Many of them had some insurance that would repay
rebuilding. And indeed, many worked to make their homes even more embedded in the fabric of the
city by renovating as fast as they could, to make their neighborhoods ever more solid – in order to
contradict any idea to demolish them.
Finally, there’s the culture of homeownership and neighborhood allegiance. The map of New Orleans is
iconic, and people feel like it represents their lives. I would argue that people felt that their
neighborhood belonged to them, and felt angry at the erasure of their love and commitment as
symbolized by the flat green dots.
12

13.
So what do we do if we want to change things – for the better?
Here are three starting points – tools to think with in approaching green space and other urban
issues.
13

14.
Where do you think this photo was taken?
This is Golden Gate Park -- before it was a park, before the space was
completely remade.
As I said earlier, we forget that urban nature isn’t natural. Plant life and
greenery survive in cities because humans either make room for it, actively
cultivate it. Sometimes, destroy neighborhoods for it.
One way to denaturalize green space – and other spaces – is to defamiliarize
it. As “to make by making strange.”
This
is
the
idea
underlying
a
lot
of
the
seeding
ideas
projects
–
you
rethink
urban
infrastructure,
like
a
parking
lot.
And
call
it
out
as
man-­‐made
and
redesignable
Designers,
of
course,
do
this
all
the
<me.
But
there
are
some
special
tricks
for
working
in
ci<es,
because
ci<es
are
so
mundane
and
so
easily
taken
for
granted.
It’s
easy
to
believe
that
Golden
Gate
Park
has
always
been
parkland,
because
that’s
what
your
eyes
tell
you.
This
is
what
geographers
call
“the
lie
of
the
land”
–
the
tendency
to
assume
that
what
you
see
is
what’s
there.
So one of my primary tools in thinking about green space is the study of
history. What can the victory gardens of WWII tell us about today?
14

15.
One way to work around obduracy is to get yourself your own allies. You can read this literally
– as in getting political allies.
But I’m fascinated by the power and weakness of what I might call charismatic images –
images that mobilize constituencies for and against the programs and ideas that they
represent. The green dots map was, in a sense, charismatic. It mobilized constituencies to
defeat it. It was, in a sense, a very successful map.
For a different example, take these satellite photos to the right – which have been called “50
Million Dollar Photos”. Why where they worth 50 Million?
On the right are two satellite photos of Washington DC. Taken together, they document the
disappearance of trees in the metropolitan area. They’re pretty murky photos, honestly. Kind of
the opposition of charismatic. But in conjunction with a newspaper photo they prompted a 50
Million Dollar commitment to reforesting DC from a charitable foundation. The city hired a
professional urban forester for the first time in many years, increased tree planting, and
drafted and approved its first tree ordinance.
These images didn’t speak for themselves – they needed human spokespeople, or maybe an
influential and far-reaching spokes-institution like the Washington Post, to argue for what they
should mean, and why they should be important.
Even if you think your work stands on its own, it will always be perceived by others as having a
context. Having allies and a community. The question is, as with the Urban Land Institute and
the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, whether your audience sees your allies as a benefit
or a downside.
15

16.
In 1969, Sherry Arnstein put forward this model for understanding citizen participation in urban
planning. I’m not going to go into the details here – there are copies you can read online – but
the rungs of the ladder move up from lesser to greater participation. I think works equally well
for thinking about the agency of potential consumers and users in design.
More tactical level, the question often is: what level am I working on? What level should I be
working on?
I often think of moving up and down the ladder in terms of obduracy. The more embedded a
network is. The more tied in it is to existing physical installations, to ways of doing things. The
more tendentious it is in terms of organizational frames. The more bound up in cultural
understanding of the “right” way to live and be happy – the higher one should consider going.
Many of the projects I’ve shown you – for example, many in the planting ideas sections – do
not face particular challenges of obduracy. Projects like reforesting a city…may well.
This requires a certain amount of honesty with ourselves. The lower levels of the ladder are
not necessarily bad – although it is hard to make a case for therapy or manipulation – but they
are often not suitable for what we want our interventions in green space to do as technologies.
16

17.
So. Let’s return to the notions of community and context that I brought up at the beginning of
this talk.
When people talk about context, they usually mean “background.” Something passive. I want
to suggest that in working with urban green space – or really, any kind of social design project
at all, context, as it’s usually understood, does not exist. There is no way to cleanly assume a
passive background. Projects spring from specific constellations of people and interests, and
interact with others. Depending on what audience they reach, the green dots are either a
sideshow or the main event.
Community, as it’s usually understood, can be a little misleading. First, because “community”
doesn’t mean agreement. Often, things that we describe as “communities” are contentious
and divided. Certainly, that’s what I see in “community” gardens. Second, because
“community” may not be the most interesting way to describe all the actors involved in a
project. Maybe they are tax payers, hives of bees, renters, or simply passers-by.
And that’s great. It means the world is more exciting, more diverse, more risky. It means you
cannot take your status as an “expert” for granted, or the applause of the people you want to
help. It makes the world more fun.
17

18.
18